Waiting for Breaking News About Trump Before the World Goes Off a Cliff

By Jim Miller

What if the world ended while we were waiting for Trump to get perp walked? 

That’s what it felt like last week as I watched the “liberal news” on MSNBC and the rest of the corporate media spent hours obsessing about Trump’s legal situation on the very same day the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its latest and starkest report.  

As the Washington Post story put it:

• The world is likely to pass a dangerous temperature threshold within the next 10 years, pushing the planet past the point of catastrophic warming — unless nations drastically transform their economies and immediately transition away from fossil fuels, according to one of the most definitive reports ever published about climate change.

• The report released Monday by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found that the world is likely to surpass its most ambitious climate target — limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial temperatures — by the early 2030s.

• Beyond that threshold, scientists have found, climate disasters will become so extreme that people will not be able to adapt. Basic components of the Earth system will be fundamentally, irrevocably altered. Heat waves, famines and infectious diseases could claim millions of additional lives by century’s end.

One would think that news of such colossal importance would merit a lead on one of the many cable news political shows, but such was not the case.  As I sat working away at my computer for several hours with the news on in the background on the day of the report’s release not a single mention made it through the wall of Trump on MSNBC and/or CNN.  

Instead, what was showcased was embarrassing monomania that mainstream Democratic-leaning pundits and reporters continue to illustrate with regard to Trump.  Indeed, the day after the IPCC report came out, I surveyed the news in the evening and for two straight hours there were only one or two non-Trump focused stories on politics, neither of which strayed too far away from the liberal boogie man.  Sadly, the pattern was predictable all week, meaning that the IPCC report will surely disappear with sparse coverage, even in places where it should be getting the most exposure.  

Of course, my anecdotal observations are far from scientific but there is some research to confirm my skepticism about how serious the corporate news is about covering climate outside the Trump lens.  During his time in office, according to the Guardian, Media Matters documented that “79 percent of the time that the corporate broadcast networks spent time covering climate change featured actions or statements by the Trump administration” with only a handful of stories escaping that lens.  

More recently, Media Matters noted that, despite some improvement, the news media in 2022 is not doing much better observing that, “climate coverage still accounted for just around 1% of all corporate broadcast programming in 2022, a figure that is woefully inadequate in the face of a worsening climate crisis.”

Thus, my dismay after my week-long survey of climate coverage seems on point.  Perhaps ignoring the most important story of our time, even on allegedly liberal outlets, is a symptom that with Biden too approving drilling projects as eagerly as his hated predecessor, the climate story no longer fits neatly into the Trump bad/Democrats good frame.  

Maybe it also suggests that our information system is part of a larger problem.  As the Washington Post piece outlines: 

• [T]he report also details how public officials, private investors and other powerful groups have repeatedly failed to heed those warnings. More than 40 percent of cumulative carbon emissions have occurred since 1990 — when the IPCC published its first study on the dangerous consequences of unchecked warming. Governments continue to subsidize fossil fuel use; banks and businesses invest far more in polluting industries than they do in climate solutions. The consumption habits of the wealthiest 10 percent of people generate three times as much pollution as those of the poorest 50 percent, the report said.

And if the corporate news system (with both its liberal and reactionary wings) that most Americans still rely on for their understanding of the world continues to dramatically underreport the urgent action needed to address the climate crisis, they are just as guilty of damning the future as Donald Trump.  One might say they are hell bent on amusing us to death.   

Now let’s get back to more breaking news about Trump . . .